T E N E B R A E
On my body, the grace of shadows
and in my heart: all Hells
and in my heart: all Hells
Elena’s eyes follow his down the cliffside and together they are tumbling, tumbling, down, down. Better than to perish alone. They are drowning, together in tangled limbs and relentless waves. He does not think he could live without the sea anymore. It is in his lungs. It is his breath. He does not yet know how close he will come to death tangled in the dark sheets of the ocean’s deep bed.
But you’d probably haunt me forever anyway….You’re here now though and I don't think you are going anywhere.
And that is the truth of them is it not? If he is the blade that presses to her breast, that she welcomes as it presses deeper, deeper leaving something terrible, something wonderful, behind in the soft of her heart... a poison that drifts in her veins and turns all to wickedness and want… then she is no better.
It is her smile that undoes him. The way it picks at all the ties that hold him together and she lets him fall apart. Tenebrae is desperate as he clutches the parts of him she has exposed together.
But he is a wonderful liar (just one of his ever growing list of sins) and he watches her with his dark, dark eyes and seems so utterly unbroken. She watches him through blue as the sun watches the moon fall as she rises and rise as she falls. She holds him with that unwavering gaze. It is her gold that glues the parts of him (that she so deftly unraveled) back together.
They are doomed to die (aren’t we all?) yet if she is Juliet then Romeo is her ill-fated lover; their love so pure, so utterly forbidden. Oh Elena why do you stand with the dagger in your heart and Romeo a ghost at your shoulder?
There is one thing that Tenebrae knows of Elena that many may not: she is cruel. She sighs, and aches when he does not touch her. He draws back, his confession spoken like a warding spell between them. But it has no power against Elena. It was a plea for her to stay away and yet she steps close, close, close.
He knows how they crave, he can almost see the question forming upon her lips, ready to be asked, why?. Up she gazes at him from beneath the bow of her dark, dark lashes. From where they stand so close, too close, where breaths mingle and distance is felt as wondering just how they are not yet touching, he can see the way his darkness frames her. He knows how she smells, of wild flower meadows, of bluebells in spring. Daylight breathes across her skin and never has he thought it tasted more wonderful, than it does now.
But she is gone.
He breathes and remembers who he is, what he is.
Elena asks of him a secret. “I want,” Tenebrae answers without pause. It is a secret that comes with the agonising weight of a confession. It is rough and deep as it cuts like liquor through his veins, his nerves. “And monks should never want.”
But he does, he does, he does.
He craves, he desires, he yearns, he wants.
“Tell me a secret of yours, please.” And it is something like a prayer, a plea. His voice is low and rough, the words just for her, for this place where they stand upon the edge of the world, surrounded by ghosts, by dreams and tales of ill-fated lovers.
And he looks to her as if she could absolve him, as if she might be the balm for the whip-wounds that smart across his spine. They remind him, they remind him that he is failing.
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